


Caro de Carne Mea *and* Like Glowing Embers

by deslea



Category: The X files
Genre: Angst, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2003-04-08
Updated: 2003-04-08
Packaged: 2017-11-03 06:59:03
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,366
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/378600
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deslea/pseuds/deslea
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"It occurs to you that it was an act of war, an assault waged on loneliness and need," and, "You're a stranger. And yet you know me better than anyone." Knowle and Shannon find their experimental counterparts after years alone. Pre-XF, spoilers to NIHT II.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Caro de Carne Mea *and* Like Glowing Embers

**Caro de Carne Mea**

They called us Adam and Eve.

The thought hammers in your mind when you hug him goodbye, chance meeting in a bar eight years after it happened. You told yourself when you reached for him that it was just a friendly hug, but it isn't true, not really. The truth is you touch whenever you can - men, women, it doesn't matter - you take it wherever you can get it, craving the touch denied you first by fear of harm and then by fear itself. He was taken aback when you did it, stood there stiff and unmoving in your arms before he held you too.

That's how you knew it was him. His neck under your hands. The other you knew they made, but never knew by name. And then the thought, over and over. He's the other, the one you've dreamed of but never dared to hope you'd find. You've built so many fantasies around him, and now your body springs to life, instantly aware, instantly aroused. You want him, God yes, but why? Because he's as formidable and indestructible as you are? Because he was named for you and made for you? Because you want it bad no matter who it is because it's been so fucking long?

His hand stills in your hair.

He knows.

You pull back and stare at each other. Breaths fast and shallow. Just a moment, the merest instant, but you recognise a host of things in his eyes and in his touch. The same loneliness. The same abnegation and denial. The same feral hunger.

"Let's go," he says. You're already tugging him by the hand, leading him out of there in a rush. His hand is firm and unwavering in your own, nothing like the hesitancy when he thought you were just another face from the life you left behind.

"How long?" you gasp when he slams you against a wall in the alley.

"I never dared," he manages before he kisses you, hard. "Thought I'd - hurt her - or - pregnant - couldn't risk - passing it on-" and that's all he says, but he transmits the rest of it in his touch, a cascade of years and half-formed fears that have driven both of you half out of your minds.

"Seven years," you burst out between ferocious kisses. "I did - at first - but then I fractured a guy's pelvis - Jesus *Christ*, Knowle, there, touch me there -" and then you cover his hands with yours and press him harder to your breasts. Your head bangs hard against the wall, and you blink when plaster shards fall onto you both. He squeezes, too hard, but need overtakes your sound of protest before it reaches your lips. His precision is familiar - memories wash over you, the way he tied his shoes or held his gun, fragments of a different life - but his grasp on your flesh is new, urgent and demanding, something you've never had from him before but you recognise it in yourself just the same. 

You break apart, breathing hard. Just a heartbeat, long enough for you to see the gleam of hunger in his eyes. You pull him back, and he seizes on your throat, sucking and biting, too hard, but the pain is a release, and you buck against him, whimpering out his name. He bows his head and sucks you hard through your clothes, and need courses through you, exquisitely sharp, from your breast to the pulsing ache between your thighs. You push him off you long enough to tear open your shirt with shaking hands, baring your breasts to the cold night air, and you're so sensitive there that they sting in the breeze. He's on his knees before you, tugging open your jeans and pulling them down off your hips, trembling violently with arrested need. You can feel his erection, pressing through his jeans against your leg, and you want it (take me fuck me hard do it God now now now) but he holds you, arms around you, kneading your ass with his hands. Holding you while he takes the flesh over your pubic bone into his mouth, and you can feel it in your clit and you grind down against him, moaning and pinching your nipples with your hands.

"I can't - down -" you force out, knees buckling, waving weakly to the car behind him. Rising, he pulls back, just a little, enough to let you stumble past him and you fall together onto the hood. You feel the cold metal against your back, feel it give way, denting in the shape of your bodies. You spread wide for him, pushing up towards him as he leans down to devour you with his mouth. The first time his tongue touches the tip of your clit, you cry out, arching your back, flailing for something to hold, smashing the windshield with your hand. He looks up, concerned, but you reach for him, squeezing his hand to reassure him, bucking upwards to urge him on. Pain is different now, still present, but no longer the priority it was, and you need him so bad. His tongue probing deep inside you pushes you over the edge, and you come hard, shivering and pleading, begging for more before the first has even passed.

He takes your hand, bloodied glass and all, and you sit up. He's still fully dressed, and you drag his shirt open, buttons falling in all directions. You kiss him, hard, tasting yourself on him while you open his jeans. He gasps when you ease the zipper down over his cock, and his hand seizes on your shoulder, hard enough to break your collarbone in the life you left behind. You lean down to take him into your mouth, something you considered a chore in years gone by, but now, you want to devour. In every possible way.

"Oh, my God," he moans, plunging his hands in your hair. "Shannon - yes - please -" but then he tugs you to stand up again, before you've gotten more than a taste, and his cock is hard against your belly, hips thrusting hard, can't wait baby need to be inside you please it's been so long, and you make low sounds of need and beg him oh, God, yes, please, there, fuck me hard fuck me now please please please, and then he pushes you up the wall, and the wall scrapes hard on your back, and he shoves it hard up into you and you cry out, grabbing him by the hair and urging him on. You need it harder, faster, and blindly, you push off the wall, propelling you both against the car - another dent - and you fall in a heap to the ground. He takes the brunt of the blow - funny how old chivalries die hard - but he keeps hold of you, as though afraid to let you go (God don't stop don't stop I need it please) and he's grazed and dirty and he marks you with his hands.

"Don't stop," you whisper against his neck. You can taste him, salt and sweat in your mouth. He strokes your face, unexpectedly tender, his hand gripping yours as your cries grow high and fast, and he comes too, gasping out your name into your hair. He thrusts into you, once, twice, three times before he falls back and comes to rest with you at last.

Slowly, you become aware again. His arms. His warmth. His hand clasped with yours. Comforting and familiar, but you're not sure how much of that is the man you knew and how much is this thing you've both become.

Your perception widens beyond the nexus that is your tangled bodies. The ground. The fresh holes in the plaster on the wall. The dents in the car nearby. Street lights further away. The dirt and the blood on you both. It occurs to you, looking at the destruction you've wrought, that it was an act of war, an assault waged on loneliness and need.

He's looking at your hand.

You watch him in bewilderment as he extricates pieces of glass from your flesh, one shard after another. Infinite patience and precision. So different to your mutual plundering. Something about the way he does it - those hands, maybe - something shifts the balance in your mind. The fantasy figure that came before him recedes. With the passing of one need, you become aware of another, a need to know and be known as you have never been known since it happened.

"Thank you," you whisper.

He smiles a little at the corners of his mouth, but he says nothing. Just keeps on working.

You try again. "I needed that." It sounds trite. Selfish. More selfish than using him as the receptacle for your outpouring of pent-up need. Understandable, maybe. Mutual, undoubtedly. But selfish just the same.

"So did I," he admits, and there is a flicker of something in his face - something ravaged. Somehow you can judge him more kindly than you judge yourself. You don't see the selfishness. Just the loneliness and the longing to touch and hold.

You don't know what else to say. What openings to give. You don't want it to end, but you've spent so long shutting people out you don't remember how to let them in. 

"We should get out of here," he says when he's done with your hand. Oblivious to your inner struggle. "Whoever owns the car could come back."

You shake your head, sparing him a smile. "It's mine."

He looks sheepish. "Sorry."

"It doesn't matter," you say, and no, it really doesn't.

You pull on your clothes in silence.

"Can I drive you somewhere?" he says when you're standing there together, awkward, looking bedraggled, but as decent as you're likely to get.

"How about your place?" you say, hugging yourself in the cold. Heart pounding. Please, you think. Please.

He looks taken aback, and you wonder if you've made a mistake, but then he nods. "Okay," he says. Impulsively, diffidently, he leans in to kiss you - not just kissing, kissing *you* - and then, more firmly, "Yes."

You take his hand, and you walk out of there, leaving the debris behind.

* * *

**Like Glowing Embers**

It's raining when you get home.

You draw her close under the eaves, shielding her while you open the front door. It's a strange, awkward intimacy, you think, fumbling with your keys, cupping her shoulder with a cautious hand. The forced intimacy of strangers, not the intimacy you have with the woman you just screwed against a wall.

You break apart at just the right speed when you get inside. Not too fast, not lingering either. You're momentarily pleased with your adept handling of the situation, and then it occurs to you in a wave of heat that it's a little late to be worried about playing it smooth.

(can't wait baby need to be inside you please it's been so long)

It wouldn't have mattered to you before. You like to think you weren't a selfish lover, but even if you were, it was no big deal. Plenty more fish in the sea, and you were young back then, strapping young soldier, plenty of time to settle down. 

But now...well, you can't afford to fuck this one up, can you? She's all you've got. You hate thinking of it like that - like what they did to you made you a meat market of two. It feels calculating. Callous. But then, she knows it too, doesn't she? Why else would she invite herself back here? Why did she lead you into the alley at all?

She's looking at you in the dim light. Listening to the rain, waiting patiently while you think of something to say.

"Come into the bedroom," you say, unthinking, and then you wince. "I mean, your clothes. I'll get you some clothes."

She nods. A little stiffly. Hugging her ruined shirt around her.

You go to your room and drop down before the dresser, pulling out drawers in search of clothing. All business, even though your heart is pounding. She appears in the doorway and watches, leaning against the doorframe, and watching her from the corner of your eye, you're conscious of warring impressions. The clean starkness of her flimsy white shirt, belying the strong lines of her body beneath it. Jeans snug around slender hips, and you can remember kneeling before her, drawing them down with shaking hands as she watched you with those glittering dark eyes, still alive even now with fading heat. And something darker lurks there, too - an abyss of loneliness you know all too well.

You force yourself to concentrate on the matter at hand.

Your hand closes on two USMC t-shirts, and you consider them a moment, pondering the perverse irony of the matching set. Considering, too, the ways that they bind you, with their ties to the service and to the past. You weigh it up, and it seems to you that they could equally help or hinder, but there's only so far you can second-guess her, and in the end comfort wins out. You put hers on the bed, sparing her the indignity of letting go of her shirt to retrieve it, and then you turn your back on her, facing the window to change.

Her hiss of pain penetrates the stillness.

"Shannon? What is it?" you say, turning, caution forgotten. Urgent. Panicky. Wondering crazily if you've done something to her. What if your biology isn't compatible with hers after all? What if-

"My back," she says. "I scraped it. On the wall."

It's the first time either of you have alluded to what happened.

"Let me look."

She turns her back in silent acquiescence. Gingerly, you draw her shirt off her shoulders. It's stuck to her with blood, and tugging it free opens freshly-scabbed wounds.

"How is it?" she wonders, and you know what she means. Not how bad. How clean.

"Not too bad. There's some cotton fibre in there. A bit of plaster. I'll get it."

"Be quick."

You get a cloth from the bathroom and wet it under warm water, and by the time you get back to her, her flesh is already healing up. It still bothers you, watching it, even after all these years, and the same old words rise in your mind. Unnatural. Inhuman. But for the first time that you can remember, your instinctive horror of your difference is tempered with something kinder. You frown a little, surprised by the realisation before you get to work.

You get it clean in time, taking your time to be sure. It heals up good. No ripples, no scar. You admire your handiwork, and risk a touch on her shoulder. "It's okay."

"Thank you," she says. She slips the t-shirt over her head and pulls it down over her body, but you stay where you are. Wary of breaking the tenuous connection you've made. She looks over her shoulder at you. "You know, I was in the Gulf in January."

You were there as well, but you don't want to interrupt whatever's sparked her train of thought by saying so. "Yeah?"

"Yeah. Got shot up pretty bad. I wouldn't let anyone touch me. Let them heal over with the bullets still in there. I opened them up myself and got them out later." 

You've done just as bad yourself, but you still wince in sympathy. "Afraid of being found out?"

She shrugs. "Afraid of being found out, afraid of transmitting it maybe - I have no idea if this thing can be passed on. I was afraid to ask."

You nod. Understanding perfectly. "They might have wanted more tests."

"Or quarantine."

"Yeah."

She gives a sudden, half-laughing sound that might just as well be a sob.

"You know, I don't even know you," she says, shaking her head. "It's been years since we served together - we were kids, for Chrissake. Now - now you're a stranger. And yet you know me better than anyone." She sighs. "I don't know if that's a good thing, or whether it's just pathetic."

You don't know what to say. Tentatively, you stroke her arm with the back of your hand, and she doesn't push you away.

"I feel like I owe you an apology," you say. "Back there - I was pretty, uh, gauche." It seems like an odd word, almost quaint, and it doesn't really capture your fumbled efforts in the alley, but you're not sure that you really want to capture them.

There's a hint of a smile in her voice. "I think we both were. Eight years is a long time." She holds you with her gaze, openly curious. "Did you know there was another one, Knowle?"

"Yes," you say. "But I didn't know who."

"Same."

An uneasy silence falls, punctuated only by the sounds of the storm, and you see in her the same desperate search. The same panicky hope that maybe the unknown other would be the one who would make it all make sense, the one to take you out of the wilderness of whatever it was they did to you and help you to go forward.

And now that you have her, you have no idea what to do with her.

What the fuck did you think was going to happen, Knowle? You were going to fall into each other's arms and face the world together? You feel mildly ashamed of your own stupidity and naivete. Then, hot on the heels of that, a host of inarticulate hopes crumble beneath you. They fall away, leaving you suddenly, abruptly bereft.

"I'm not always - I don't -" you begin, and then you lose the thought. Sadness rushes over you, grief for a myriad of things lost to you, so hard and fast it leaves you reeling. Instinctively, you reach out, groping blindly for her. Tears slip down over your cheeks, just a couple of them, but you haven't cried since 1983, since the bombing of the MAU.

She stares up at you. Almost as shocked as you are. 

"Knowle," she whispers, and she turns in your arms and she holds you, grasping at your shoulders, strong and ferociously tender. You cling to each other, and wracking sounds of grief pass between you without you knowing whether they're yours or hers.

You never really know where pain ends and passion begins. It isn't the first kiss, huddled together in the warmth of a shared breath - that's soft and slow and it tastes of mingled tears. It isn't the second, her shaking fingers finding your jaw as you push back her hair with your hands. It might be the third, when you gather her up, fiercely tender, and her palms grow firmer and surer and find their way into your hair.

"They'll use us against each other, Knowle, you know they will," she whispers against your lips.

You nod. You know.

It's gentler this time. Infinitely soft and slow. Not the harsh flames of ravenous hunger before. More like glowing embers splashing warmth and light in the dark. You see it when she kneels on the bed and stretches out her hand to you. You feel it when you sink down together into the pillows, blankets drawn over you both against the cold. You hear it in her voice when she seizes around you, sighing out your name.

"It's dark days ahead," she says when you're done and spooned together, watching the lashings of the storm against the windowpane.

You tighten your arm around her. "Yeah."

"They made us like this for something, Knowle."

"We'll face it together." You know that counts for very nearly nothing, but you say it because it seems like the right thing to say.

"That's not going to fix it," she says, but there's a note of indulgence in her voice, as well.

You don't have an answer for that. You stay there with her, stroking her, frowning.

"It's enough, Shannon," you say finally. "Maybe it doesn't fix anything, but it's enough."

She nods a little. Kisses your hand. Doesn't answer.

You drift off to sleep together in the dark.

 

END

**Author's Note:**

> The title of the first story is derived from the creation story in Genesis 2:23: Hoc, inquit, os ex ossibus meis, et caro de carne mea. In English, it translates roughly to, "This is," [Adam] said, "the bone of my bones and the flesh of my flesh." Adam and Eve recognise themselves in one another and, in the next verse, we are told that they make love.
> 
> The title of the second, like its prequel, is another biblical reference. This verse is less directly relevant to the story, but geeks - er, trivia buffs might be interested to know how it came about.
> 
> It started with the first story. Caro de carne mea is from the Latin Vulgate version of the creation story, in which Adam and Eve recognise their own likeness in one another and make love, much as Knowle and Shannon did. 
> 
> However, this spawned a discussion of biblical etymology with a Hungarian friend, who mentioned that the Hungarian word for (hu)man is ember. This really appealed to me, with its connotations of warmth and (to mix my religious metaphors) the kind of phoenix-like themes I like to work with, of love and life springing out of the ashes of destruction. 
> 
> So when the time came to name this sequel, I exposed my big ol' biblical geek roots and pulled out my concordance. "Like glowing embers" is from the NIV translation of Psalm 102:3, and it relates to being in pain and aching for comfort. It's also, I might add, a pretty crappy translation when compared with the Latin (I haven't checked it against Hebrew), but hey, literary licence and stuff.
> 
> And yet again, I've exposed the full range of my geekiness. Go me.


End file.
